According to WalletHub, Juneau, Alaska ranks 29 among 180 cities surveyed to determine which of them recovered most quickly from the Covid-19 unemployment crisis of 2020.
The most quickly recovered city in the survey was Lincoln, Neb., followed by Omaha, Neb. They now have unemployment rates of 2.6 percent and 3.3 percent respectively.
Juneau unemployment rate is 5.9 percent at the time of the study, which compared June 2021 to June of 2019 and January of 2020.
Juneau bounced back 23.18% from June 2019 to June 2021 and improved 26.37% from January, 2020 to June, 2021.
That 5.9 percent unemployment rate in Juneau is the exact national average for the study timeframe.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous for U.S. employment, but the job market is showing signs of healing now that the country has mostly reopened. The national unemployment rate is currently at 5.9%, which is 60% lower than the peak of 14.8% during the height of the pandemic,” WalletHub reported.
Anchorage made the 70th spot on the list, with unemployment at 6.20% in June.
To identify where workers have been most affected by the coronavirus pandemic economy, WalletHub compared 180 cities based on four metrics and used the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. That data comes with a caveat, because BLS disclosed that it misclassified some workers on temporary layoffs as “absent from work because of other reasons” rather than “unemployed.” Therefore, the real unemployment rate in June might be around 3% higher than reported, WalletHub noted.
For this reason, WalletHub included two columns for the unemployment rate in the table linked here. One has the officially reported unemployment rate, and one with the “adjusted” rate after accounting for the misclassification.
